Season of Migration to the North (12 page)

Thinking over Mustafa Sa’eed’s words as he sat in that very
place on just such a night as this, I listened to her sobbing as though it came
to me from afar, mingled in my mind with scattered noises which I had no doubt
heard at odd times but which all intertwined together in my brain like a
carillon of church bells: the scream of a child somewhere in the neighbourhood,
the crowing of cocks, the braying of a donkey and the sounds of a wedding
coming from the far side of the river. But now I heard only one sound, that of
her anguished weeping. I did nothing. I sat on where I was without moving and
left her to weep alone to the night till she stopped. I had to say something,
so I said, ‘Clinging to the past does no one any good. You have two children
and are still a young woman in the prime of life. Think about the future. Who
knows, perhaps you will accept one of the numerous suitors who want to marry
you.’

‘After Mustafa Sa’eed,’ she answered immediately with a
decisiveness that astonished me, ‘I shall go to no man.’

Though I had not intended to, I said to her, ‘Wad Rayyes
wants to marry you. Your father and family don’t object. He asked me to talk to
you on his behalf.’

She was silent for so long that, presuming she was not going
to say anything, I was on the point of getting up to leave. At last, though, I
became aware of her voice in the darkness like the blade of a knife. ‘If they
force me to marry, I’ll kill him and kill myself.’

I thought of several things to say; but presently I heard the
muezzin calling for the night prayer: ‘God is great. God is great’. So I stood
up, and so did she, and I left without saying anything.

While
I was drinking my morning coffee Wad Rayyes came to me. I had intended to go to
his house but he forestalled me. He said that he had come to remind me of the
invitation of the day before, but I knew that, unable to hold himself in wait,
he had come to learn of the result of my intervention.

‘It’s no good,’ I told him as he seated himself ‘She doesn’t
want to marry at all. If I were you I’d certainly let the whole matter drop.’

I had not imagined that the news would have such an effect on
him. However Wad Rayyes, who changed women as he changed donkeys, now sat in
front of me with a morose expression on his face, eyelids trembling, savagely
biting his lower lip. He began fidgeting in his seat and tapping the ground
nervously with his stick. He took off the slipper from his right foot and put
it on again several times as though preparing to get up and go, then reseated
himself and opened his mouth as though wishing to speak but  without doing so.
How extraordinary! Was it reasonable to suppose that Wad Rayyes was in love?
‘It’s not as if there’re not plenty of other women to marry’ I said to him.

His intelligent eyes were no longer intelligent but had
become two small glass globes fixed in a rigid stare. ‘I shall marry no one but
her,’ he said. ‘She’ll accept me whether she likes it or not. Does she imagine
she’s some queen or princess? Widows in this village are more common than empty
bellies. She should thank God she’s found a husband like me.’

‘If she’s just like every other woman, then why this
insistence? I said to him. ‘You know she’s refused many men besides you, some
of them younger. If she wants to devote herself to bringing up her children,
why not let her do as she pleases?’

Suddenly Wad Rayyes burst out into a crazy fit of rage which
I regarded as quite out of character. In a violent state of excitement, he said
something that truly astonished me: ‘Ask yourself why Mahmoud’s daughter
refused marriage. You’re the reason — there’s certainly something between you
and her. Why do you interfere? You’re not her father or her brother or the
person responsible for her. She’ll marry me whatever you or she says or does.
Her father’s agreed and so have her brothers. This nonsense you learn at school
won’t wash with us here. In this village the men are guardians of the women.’

I don’t know what would have happened if my father had not
come in at that moment. Immediately I got up and left.

I
went to see Mahjoub in his field. Mahjoub and I are of the same age. We had
grown up together and had sat at adjoining desks in the elementary school. He
was more clever than I. When we finished our elementary education Mahjoub had
said, ‘This amount of education will do me — reading, writing and arithmetic.
We’re farming folk like our fathers and grandfathers. All the education a
farmer wants is to be able to write letters, to read the newspapers and to know
the prescribed rules for prayers. Also so that if we’ve got some problem we can
make ourselves understood with the powers-that-be.’

I went my own way and Mahjoub turned into a real power in the
village, so that today he has become the Chairman of the Agricultural Project
Committee and the Co-operative, and a member of the committee of the hospital
that is almost finished. He heads every delegation which goes to the provincial
centre to take up instances of injustice. With independence Mahjoub became one
of the local leaders of the National Democratic Socialist Party. We would
occasionally chat about our childhood in the village and he would say to me,
‘But look where you are now and where I am. You’ve become a senior civil
servant and I’m a farmer in this god-forsaken village.’

‘It's you who’ve succeeded, not I,’ I would say to him with
genuine admiration, ‘because you influence actual life in the country. We civil
servants, though, are of no consequence. People like you are the legal heirs of
authority; you are the sinews of life, you’re the salt of the earth.’

‘If we’re the salt of the earth,’ Mahjoub would say with a
laugh, ‘then the earth is without fIavour.’

He laughed too on hearing of my encounter with Wad Rayyes.
‘Wad Rayyes is an old windbag. He doesn’t mean what he says.’

‘You know that my relationship with her is dictated by duty
neither more nor less,’ I said to him.

‘Don’t pay any attention to Wad Rayyes’s drivel,’ said Mahjoub.
‘Your reputation in the village is without blemish. The people all speak well
of you because you’re doing your duty by the children of Mustafa Sa’eed, God
rest his soul. He was, after all, a stranger who was in no way related to you.’
After a short silence he said, ‘Anyway if the woman’s father and brothers are
agreeable no one can do anything about it.’ 

‘But if she doesn’t want to marry?’ I said to him.

‘You know how life is run here,’ he interrupted me. ‘Women
belong to men, and a man’s a man even if he’s decrepit.’

‘But the world’s changed,’ I said to him. ‘These are things
that no longer fit in with our life in this age.’

‘The world hasn’t changed as much as you think,’ said Mahjoub.
‘Some things have changed — pumps instead of water-wheels, iron ploughs instead
of wooden ones, sending our daughters to school, radios, cars, learning to
drink whisky and beer instead of arak and millet wine — yet even so
everything’s as it was.’ Mahjoub laughed as he said, ‘The world will really
have changed when the likes of me become ministers in the government. And
naturally that,’ he added still laughing, ‘is an out-and-out impossibility.’

‘Do you think Wad Rayyes has fallen in love with Hosna Bint Mahmoud?
I said to Mahjoub, who had cheered me up.

‘It’s not out of the question,’ said Mahjoub. ‘Wad Rayyes is
a man who hankers after things. For two years now he’s been singing her
praises. He asked for her in marriage before and her father accepted but she
refused. They waited, hoping that in time she’d accept.’

‘But why this sudden passion?’ I said to Mahjoub.

‘Wad Rayyes has known Hosna Bint Mahmoud since she was a
child. Do you remember her as a wild young girl climbing trees and fighting
with boys? As a child she used to swim naked with us in the river. What’s
happened to change that now?’

‘Wad Rayyes,’ said Mahjoub, ‘is like one of those people who
are crazy about owning donkeys — he only admires a donkey when he sees some
other man riding it. Only then does he find it beautiful and strives hard to
buy it, even if he has to pay more than it’s worth.’ After thinking for a while
in silence, he said, ‘It’s true, though, that Mahmoud’s daughter changed after
her marriage to Mustafa Sa’eed. All women change after marriage, but she in particular
underwent an indescribable change. It was as though she were another person.
Even we who were her contemporaries and used to play with her in the village
look at her today and see her as something new — like a city woman, if you know
what I mean.’

I asked Mahjoub about Mustafa Sa’eed. ‘God rest his soul,’ he
said. ‘We had a mutual respect for each other. At first the relationship
between us was not a strong one, but our work together on the Project Committee
brought us closer. His death was an irreparable loss. You know he gave us
invaluable help in organizing the Project. He used to look after the accounts
and his business experience was of great use to us. It was he who pointed out
that we should invest the profits from the Project in setting up a flour mill.
We were saved a lot of expense and today people come to us from all over the
place. It was he too who pointed out that we should open a co-operative shop.
Our prices now are no higher than those in Khartoum. In the old days, as you
know supplies used to arrive by steamer once or twice a month. The traders
would hoard them till the market had run out, then they would sell them for
many times their cost. Today the Project owns ten lorries that bring us
supplies every other day direct from Khartoum and Omdurman. I asked him more
than once to take over the Chairmanship, but he always used to refuse, saying I
was better suited. The Omda and the merchants absolutely loathed him because he
opened the villagers’ eyes and spoiled things for them. After his death there
were rumours that they had planned to kill him — mere talk. He died from
drowning — tens of men were drowned that year. He was a man of great mental
capacity Now, there was a man — if there is any justice in the world — who
deserved to be a minister in the government.’

‘Politics have spoilt you,’ I said to Mahjoub. ‘You’ve come
to think only in terms of power. Let’s not talk about ministries and the
government — tell me about him as a man. What sort of a person was he?’

Astonishment showed on his face. ‘What do you mean by what
sort of a person?’ he said. ‘He was as I’ve described him.’ I could not find
the appropriate words for explaining what I meant to Mahjoub. ‘In any case,’ he
said, ‘what’s the reason for your interest in Mustafa Sa’eed? You’ve already
asked me several times about him.’ Before I could reply Mahjoub continued, ‘You
know, I don’t understand why he made you the guardian of his children. Of
course, you deserve the honour of the trust and have carried out your
responsibilities in admirable fashion. Yet you knew him less than any of us. We
were here with him in the village while you saw him only from year to year. I
was expecting he’d have made me, or your grandfather, guardian. Your
grandfather was a close friend of his and he used to enjoy listening to his
conversation. He used to say to me, “You know, Mahjoub, Hajj Ahmed is a unique
person.” "Hajj Ahmed’s an old windbag," I would reply and he would
get really annoyed. "No, don’t say that,” he’d say to me. "Hajj Ahmed
is a part of history."

‘In any case,’ I said to Mahjoub. ‘I’m only a guardian in
name. The real guardian is you. The two boys are here with you, and I’m way off
in Khartoum.’

‘They’re intelligent and well-mannered boys,’ said Mahjoub.
‘They take after their father. They couldn’t be doing better in their studies.’

‘What will happen to them,’ I said, ‘if this laughable
business of marriage Wad Rayyes has in mind goes through?’

‘Take it easy!’ said Mahjoub. ‘Wad Rayyes will certainly
become obsessed with some other woman. Let’s suppose, at the very worst, she
marries him; I don’t think he’ll live more than a year or two, and she’ll have
her share of his many lands and crops.’

Then, like a sudden blow that lands right on the top of one’s
head, Mahjoub’s words struck home: ‘Why don’t you marry her?’ My heart beat so
violently within me that I almost lost control. It was some time before I found
words and, in a trembling voice, said to Mahjoub: ‘You’re joking of course.’

‘Seriously,’ he said, ‘why don’t you marry her? I’m certain
she’d accept. You’re the guardian of the two boys, and you might as well round
things off by becoming a father.’

I remembered her perfume of the night before and the thoughts
about her that had taken root in my head in the darkness.

‘Don’t tell me,’ I heard Mahjoub saying with a laugh, ‘that
you’re already a husband and a father. Every day men are taking second wives.
You wouldn’t be the first or the last.’

‘You’re completely mad,’ I said to Mahjoub, laughing, having
recovered my self-control.

I left him and took myself off having become certain about a
fact which was later on to cost me much peace of mind: that in one form or
another I was in love with Hosna Bint Mahmoud, the widow of Mustafa Sa’eed, and
that I — like him and Wad Rayyes and millions of others — was not immune from
the germ of contagion that oozes from the body of the universe. 

After
we had had the circumcision celebrations
for the two boys I returned to Khartoum.
Leaving my wife and daughter in the village, I journeyed by the desert road in
one of the Project’s lorries. I generally used to travel by steamer to the
river port of Karima and from there I would take the train, passing by Abu Hamad
and Atbara to Khartoum. But this time I was, for no particular reason, in a
hurry so I chose to go the shortest way. The lorry set off first thing in the
morning and proceeded eastwards along the Nile for about two hours, then turned
southwards at right angles and struck off into the desert. There is no shelter
from the sun which rises up into the sky with unhurried steps, its rays
spilling out on the ground as though there existed an old blood feud between it
and the people of the earth. There is no shelter apart from the hot shade
inside the lorry — shade that is not really shade. A monotonous road rises and
falls with nothing to entice the eye: scattered bushes in the desert, all
thorns and leafless, miserable trees that are neither alive nor dead. The lorry
travels for hours without our coming across a single human being or animal.
Then it passes by a herd of camels, likewise lean and emaciated. There is not a
single cloud heralding hope in this hot sky which is like the lid of Hell·fire.
The day here is something without value, a mere torment suffered by living
creatures as they await the night. Night is deliverance. In a state close to
fever, haphazard thoughts flooded through my head: words taken from sentences,
the forms of faces, voices which all sounded as desiccated as light flurries of
wind blowing across fallow fields. Why the hurry? ‘Why the hurry?’ she had
asked me. ‘Why don’t you stay another week?’ she had said. ‘The black donkey; a
bedouin fellow cheated your uncle and sold him the black donkey.’